Heavy Rains, Hurricane

Wow what a busy past 30 hours in the weather world. I had visitors in town with work and have been so out of touch.

So although I was dog tired after driving 600 miles in 4 days and working 14 Macy's stores, I stayed up until 5am watching the hurricane make landfall on tv.

It amazes me how much those reporters put on the line to get the story. I won't lie, I'd give my left leg to be one of those weather channel reporters! (okay not really, but you know what I mean)

Let's start with the non-hurricane rain.

Wichita, Chicago-land

Both the Wichita, Kansas and Chicago, Illinois metropolitan areas saw 6-12 inches of rain over the past 2 days.

We have a great network of CoCoRaHS observers in both locatons so you can check out the maps and see the precipitation footprint left behind by the storm.

The Wichita airport set a record rainfall on 9-12.

I heard one report that over 100 basements were flooded in the Chicago area from all the heavy rain.

Hurricane Ike

What do I say, it was amazing to watch and it is all over the news so I am sure you don't need me to write about it here in the blog.

My family is surrounded by tornado warnings even as I write this blog Saturday afternoon. They live in central Arkansas.

The storm made a direct hit on Galveston/Houston and hammered the entire coastline -- all the way into Louisiana.

I was just reading the local storm reports from Houston and the Tomball CoCoRaHS observer was called out with a foot of rain. (12.10" to be exact)

I talked with my 4 co-workers in the greater Houston area via text message and they all made it through, but all have damage to trees, roofs and/or fences.

Someone left me a message on Friday asking if I thought the hurricane had shifted slightly to the right.

I apologize for not getting that until today and for not being able to answer you.

As hurricanes near land, regardless of what forecast models show and try to predict, they wobble and can move erraticaly left to right.

Which is really tough because a small shift means someone gets in the eye and someone gets the brunt of the surge.

Did anyone watch Foxnews and Geraldo as he reported from the eye? Wow -- really something.

Forecasting is a difficult science, let alone forecasting a storm over water where there are no surface weather observations...but I have to say models and forecasters really had a handle on this storm.